Crawford: Upgrade sex ed to cut SC teen birthrate further

New data showing South Carolina’s teen birth rate plummeted by 61 percent since 1991 (“South Carolina’s teen birth rate down 61 percent since early ’90s”) should encourage and challenge lawmakers. During the upcoming second year of the legislative session, a top priority must be upgrading our state’s sex education and continuing to fully fund efforts spearheaded by organizations such as the S.C. Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy that work to educate teens about both abstinence and age-appropriate contraception.

South Carolina has much to celebrate in terms of progress: We’re one of 22 states that mandate sex education be taught in public schools, the birth rate to 15- to 17-year-olds has declined 71 percent since peaking in 1991, and our sex education law was recently amended to include prevention-oriented child sexual abuse programs.

We didn’t get this far by accident. Advocates for responsible reproductive health in public schools have been working toward these outcomes since at least the 1980s, when Republican Gov. Carroll Campbell signed the Comprehensive Health Education Act, which outlined age-appropriate content for young people from general community health to reproductive health, including pregnancy prevention, disease prevention and family life education. The dramatic decline in our teen birth rate never would have happened without the fierce advocacy efforts to secure comprehensive health education in public schools.

But to be clear, the young people in our state still face major threats to their health and well-being. South Carolina still ranks 12th in the nation in teen birth rate, and we land in the top 10 states for rates of gonorrhea, chlamydia and AIDS.

Our young people deserve better. Now is the time to double down on updated health education that gives them the facts about their bodies so they can make healthy decisions.

These new numbers point to progress, but shouldn’t lull us into complacency. As we move into the 2016 legislative session, let us use this data to inspire lawmakers to create a future where young people receive accurate information, have a safe space to ask questions and have honest conversations and are supported by their communities to make healthy decisions that impact the future of our state.

This story was originally published December 22, 2015 at 7:46 AM with the headline "Crawford: Upgrade sex ed to cut SC teen birthrate further."